If they don’t give me a blank look, most folks hear customer experience and ask, “So, you work in a call center?” After stifling a groan, I go through the standard explanation that customer experience is broader than just service, and how a great customer experience often prevents the needs for a service call in the first place. I explored the difference between customer service and experience in this post about Target’s data breach.
But as my friend Mara Bain says, “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.” So I’ve been looking for a quicker way to grab somebody’s attention. Here’s what I’ve tried:
“I prevent customers from having to think.”
It’s still new, but so far it seems to make people curious enough to listen to the rest of the story. And it clearly differentiates between customer experience and service.
What do I mean by this? Dan Ariely has written extensively about decision fatigue, which he calls ego-depletion. Making decisions is hard work, and spending too much time deciding causes fatigue, reducing the effectiveness of follow-up decisions.
Isn’t that what makes a poor experience? Too much thinking?
Great experiences help my decision-making:
- Amazon has a billion products. But they also have guides to help me. Consumer ratings and Amazon recommendations allow me to put my decision-making on auto-pilot, saving it up for something more important than which bike lock is the best.
- Sam’s Club, Costco and Trader Joe’s do the choosing for me. Rather than the 30 laundry soap options at Target, Costco has two. I can move on to the next decision.
- Credit unions and USAA have helpful people to make my choices for me. I can outsource decision-making to them.
- On the other hand, most health plans make me do a lot of thinking. Which is why they’re on the bottom of both Forrester and Temkin customer experience charts.
Great customer experiences use design to help you with your choices, reducing your effort. And they’re rewarded with loyalty – why should I go learn a new store layout and put all that effort in, when I can just go to my favorite place?
So try this line out the next time somebody asks you what customer experience is. And let me know you it works for you. In the meantime, I’m going to spend my decision capabilities on deciding which lake to visit in these last days of summer.
